Thursday, June 04, 2009

JavaOne 2009 Day Four (04/06/2009)

The third day of JavaOne proper (the fourth day if including CommunityOne on Monday) started with a General Session on interoperability hosted by (of all companies) Microsoft. It shouldn't be too surprising, actually, because Sun and Microsoft buried the hatchet about 5 years ago and started to work on interoperability. Time will tell if that was an unholy alliance or not.

Dan'l Lewin (Corporate VP, Strategy and Emerging Business Development, Microsoft) took the stage for some opening remarks. What he said resonated quite well, i.e., that users expect things to just work. Data belongs to users and should move freely across systems. The key themes are interoperability, customer choice and collaboration.

Lewin pointed to TCP/IP as the quintessential standard. Antennae and wall plugs may change from country to country, but TCP/IP is the universal standard for connectivity, which is why the Internet just works. [I could add many other standards to this list, which would also have "just worked" but for Microsoft!]

Lewin added that the significant partners that Microsoft is working with in the Java world are Sun, the Eclipse Foundation and the Apache Software Foundation. The key areas where Sun and Microsoft work together are:

Identity Management interoperability has progressed a great deal with the near-universal adoption of SAML. On virtualisation, where host and guest systems are involved, Lewin put it very well when he said Sun and Microsoft control each other's environment "in a respectful way."

A website on his slide pack was www.interoperabilitybridges.com .

Steven Martin (Senior Director, Developer Platform Productivity Management, Microsoft) took over from Lewin and started off with "we come in peace and want to talk about interoperability".

He introduced Project Stonehenge, a project under Apache, with code available under the Apache Licence. This uses IBM's stock trading application to demonstrate component-level interoperability between the Microsoft and Sun stacks.

Greg Leake of Microsoft and Harold Carr of Sun then provided a live demo of this interoperability.

The stock trading application has four tiers, - the UI, a business logic tier, a further business logic tier housing the order processing service, and the database tier. The reason for splitting the business logic tier into two was to demonstrate not just UI tier to business logic tier connectivity but also service-to-service interop. The Microsoft stack was built on .NET 3.5, with ASP.NET as the UI technology and WCF the services platform. The Sun stack was based on JSP for the UI and the Metro stack for services, running on Glassfish. Both stacks pointed back to a SQLServer database.

The first phase of the demo showed the .NET stack running alone, with Visual Studio breakpoints to show the progress of a transaction through the various tiers. Then the ASP.NET tier was reconfigured to talk to the Metro business logic layer, and the control remained with the Java stack thereafter. In the third phase of the demo, the Metro business service layer called the order processing service in the .NET stack. The application worked identically in all three cases, effectively demonstrating bidirectional service interoperability between .NET and Metro Web Services.

Martin also mentioned a useful principle for interoperability, "Assume that all applications are blended, and that all client requests are non-native". This is analogous, I guess, to that other principle, "Be conservative in what you send, and liberal in what you accept".

He also referred to "the power of choice with the freedom to change your mind", which I thought was a neat summarisation of user benefits.

Aisling MacRunnels (Senior VP, Software Marketing, Sun) joined Steven Martin on stage to talk about the Sun-Microsoft collaboration, which isn't just limited to getting the JRE to run on Windows. Microsoft also cooperates with Sun to get other "Sun products" like MySQL, VirtualBox and OpenOffice to work on the Microsoft platform. The last item must be particularly galling to the monopoly. Microsoft is also working to get Sharepoint authentication happening against OpenSSO using SAML2. Likewise, WebDAV is being supported in Sun's Storage Cloud. In other words, when both parties support open standards, their interoperability improves.

I think it speaks more of the quality and tightness of a standard than of vendor cooperation when systems work together. Sun and Microsoft shouldn't need to talk to each other or have a cozy relationship. Their systems need to just work together in the first place.

The next session I attended was "Metro Web Services Security Usage Scenarios" by Harold Carr and Jiandong Guo of Sun. Carr is Metro Architect and Guo is Metro Security Architect, so we pretty much had the very brains of the project talking to us.

There wasn't very much in the lecture that was specific to Metro. Most of the security usage patterns were general PKI knowledge, but I must say the diagrams that illustrated the logic flow in each pattern were top class. I have seen many documents on PKI, but these are some of the best. My only quibble with them is they tend to use the same terms "encrypt/decrypt" in two separate contexts - "encrypt/decrypt" and "sign/verify".

Some of the interesting points they made were:

- The list of security profiles bundled with Metro will be refactored soon. Some will be dropped and new ones will be added.- SSL performance is still better than WS-Security, even with optimisations such as derived keys and WS-SecureConversation. [WS-Security uses a fresh ephemeral key for every message, while WS-SecureConversation caches and reuses the same ephemeral key for the whole session.]

- Metro 2.0 is due in September 2009.

I then attended a session called "Pragmatic Identity 2.0: Simple, Open Identity Services using REST" by Pat Patterson and Ron Ten-Hove of Sun. Ten-Hove is also known for his work on Integration and JBI. He was the spec lead for JSR 208.

[As part of their demo, I realised that NetBeans has at least a couple of useful features I didn't know about earlier. There's an option to "create entity classes from tables" (using JPA, I presume), and another one to "create RESTful web services from entity classes".]

It's a bit difficult to describe the demo that Patterson gave. On the surface, it was a standard application that implemented user-based access control. One user saw more functions than another. The trick was in making it RESTful. Nothing had to be explicitly coded for, which was the cool part. The accesses were intercepted and authenticated/authorised without the business application being aware of it. As I said, it's hard to describe without the accompanying code.

The next session was on "The Web on OSGi: Here's How" by Don Brown of Atlassian. Brown is a very polished and articulate speaker and he kept his audience chuckling.

OSGi is something that has fascinated me for a while but I haven't got my head around it completely yet. At a high level, OSGi is a framework to allow applications to be composed dynamically from components and services that may appear and disappear at run-time. Dependencies are reduced or eliminated by having each component "bundle" use its own classloader, so version incompatibilities can be avoided. Different bundles within the same application can use different versions of libraries without conflicts, because they don't share classloaders.

OSGi is cool but complex. As Brown repeatedly pointed out, while it can solve many integration and dependency problems, it is not trivial to learn. Those who want to use OSGi must be prepared to learn many fundamental concepts, especially around the classloader. Also, components may appear and disappear at will in a dynamic manner. How must the application behave when a dependency is suddenly exposed?

2.Embedded OSGi server via bridge (OSGi container runs within a JEE container using a servlet bridge)Examples: Equinox servlet bridgeAdvantages: Can use JEE server, application is still OSGiDisadvantages: (I didn't have time to note this down)

I learnt a number of new terms and names of software products in this session.- Spring DM (Dynamic Modules)- Peaberry using Guice- Declarative Services (part of the OSGi specification)- iPOJO- BND and Spring Bundlor are tools used to create bundles- Felix OSGi is embedded as part of Atlassian's existing plugin framework.- Spring DM is used to manage services.- Automatic bundle transformation is a cool feature that Brown mentioned but did not describe.

Brown gave us a demo using JForum and showed that even if a legacy application isn't sophisticated enough to know about new features, modules with such features can be incorporated into it.

I had been under the impression that OSGi was only used by rich client applications on the desktop. This session showed me that it's perhaps even more useful for web applications on the server side.

My last session of the day was a hands-on lab (Bring Your Own Laptop) called "Java Technology Strikes Back on the Client: Easier Development and Deployment", conducted by Joey Shen and a number of others who cruised around and lent a helping hand whenever one got stuck. It looks like Linux support for JavaFX has just landed (Nigel Eke, if you're reading this, you were right after all), and a very quiet landing it has been, too. But it's still only for NetBeans 6.5.1, not NetBeans 6.7 beta. At any rate, I was more interested in just checking to see if it worked. It turned out that there were a couple of syntax errors in the sample app which had to be corrected before the application could run. I was very keen to try the drag-and-drop feature with which one could pull an applet out of the browser window and install it as a desktop icon (Java Web Start application). Unfortunately, this feature requires a workaround in all X11 systems (Unix systems using the X Window System), because the window manager intercepts drag commands and applies it to the window as a whole. There was a workaround described for applets but none for a JavaFX application. As time was up, I had to leave without being able to see drag-and-drop in action. Never mind, I'm sure samples and documentation will only become more widely available as time goes on, and Sun will undoubtedly make JavaFX even easier to use in future.

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"To Analyse, Understand and Explain"

This site presents the technology-related opinions (wise or otherwise) of Ganesh Prasad - software architect, Java devotee and Open Source aficionado. (For my views on other topics, see this blog instead.)Disclaimer: Though I bear the name of the Hindu god of wisdom, Lord Ganesh, such cosmic wisdom is not always guaranteed to be transmitted through my writings. Reader beware!